With an increased interest in cell-specific drug testing, diagnosis, and other assays, systems that allow for individual cell isolation, identification, and retrieval are becoming more desirable within the field of cellular analysis. Furthermore, with the onset of personalized medicine, low-cost, high fidelity cellular sorting systems are becoming highly desirable. However, preexisting cell capture systems and systems to image captured cells suffer from various shortcomings that prevent widespread adoption for cell-specific testing. For example, flow cytometry requires that the cell be simultaneously identified and sorted, and limits cell observation and imaging to a single instance. Flow cytometry thus fails to allow for multiple analyses of the same cell, and does not permit arbitrary cell subpopulation sorting. Conventional microfluidic devices fail to allow for subsequent cell removal without cell damage, which hinders further analysis and imaging of isolated cells. Cellular filters can separate sample components based on size without significant cell damage, but suffer from clogging and do not allow for specific cell identification, isolation, and retrieval. Current systems for capturing cells and imaging/analyzing captured cells are thus severely limited.
Thus, there is a need in the cellular analysis field to create a new and useful system for imaging captured cells or other features of a biological sample at an imaging substrate. This invention provides such a new and useful system.